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Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 03 Mar 2015 20:15:15 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Serial offenders plague Twitterhttp://boingboing.net/2014/11/14/serial-offenders-plague-twitte.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/11/14/serial-offenders-plague-twitte.html#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 14:39:21 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=345765Glenn Fleishman reports on how the platform could fix its harassment problem.]]>Twitter has an abuse problem, and it's not the one that you think. While there are endless complaints about the service's inability to respond rapidly to reports of harassment—especially sustained campaigns—its power is limited even when it does act. It can suspend an account, temporarily or forever, but not prevent abusers from creating new ones.

The recent GamerGate saga, in particular, highlighted sequential account creation as the weapon of choice for maintaining a relentless stream of online abuse†. To foster account creation—and its business model, stock-market valuation, and advertising rates—Twitter requires only an email address to start an account.

I'm sure Twitter fights spam heavily, because that degrades the user experience in general. But the same rules—and spamfighting tools such as blocks on IP ranges and automated account creation—are of little use against a determined individual willing to trigger permanent account suspension for multiple accounts over a period of time. One must work awfully hard to earn that level of animosity from Twitter in the first place, yet the social network is seemingly helpless to keep them off, because, unlike Facebook, it requires no proof of identity, nor does it vet later for a lack of it.

Serial Accounts: You may not create multiple accounts for disruptive or abusive purposes, or with overlapping use cases. Mass account creation may result in suspension of all related accounts. Please note that any violation of the Twitter Rules is cause for permanent suspension of all accounts.

Twitter didn't respond to a follow-up query asking about how it enforces a sequential ban.

While it's an obvious problem, the extent isn't widely known or quantified, and unless you're the victim of harassment, you may be unaware of it. Women and people of color receive a vastly disproportionate percentage of harassment on Twitter (as well as online).

GamerGate is the largest, most sustained, and most lopsided case I've ever seen of this. I am aware of several individuals who are on their umpty-umpth account; in one case, I know of six previous accounts, all using the same (and real) public name. Due to requests by people being actively harassed, sometimes with an actual physical component, I'm avoiding more detail. However, Kotaku just ran a story about a game-focused harasser who has had accounts suspended in the "dozens if not hundreds" for violation of terms.

In the normal scheme of behavior and consequences, someone who had put any time into her or his Twitter account — accumulating followers, a history of messages, and becoming recognized by a handle — would be deterred by the loss of this identity from pushing too far. Someone who went over the line so egregiously that Twitter suspended the account permanently would conceivably take that reprimand as a disincentive to either return with a new account or to behave as extremely in the future.

So when we talk about sequentially suspended individuals, we're talking about folks deeply invested in their need to speak, whether to troll, grief, or rage. In the case of GamerGate and other political areas that attract harassers, there's the supposition that a significant percentage of accounts are sock puppets: disposable creations of someone who can afford to burn those accounts without losing their central account and credibility. (For an extreme case of sock puppetry, read Aja Romano's account of a decade-long trolling by a hate blogger whose identity was recently tied to an up-and-coming science fiction writer.)

Twitter's policy would clearly demand abusers not create new accounts and perpetuate the same behavior. Its abuse response provides a high-enough bar, that it takes the same effort by those targeted to report recidivists, though in monitoring some of these individuals, it's clear Twitter doesn't play any games about their actions: the new accounts are quickly banned after being reported.

This particular case is yet another nail in the coffin of the desirability of pure anonymity in socially-engaged parts of the Internet. Anonymity is a powerful tool for free speech and democracy when countering the power of the state, and the Internet offers the fullest expression of such anonymity, but the fight for anonymous speech ends when promotion of it is inexorably and demonstrably linked to enabling harassers. You can see this in every online forum, every comment thread, every social network: where speech has no consequence, harassment flourishes.

By its business model, Twitter is reactive to abuse and rightly uses a light hand that protects legitimate parties from being dogpiled on but always keeps harassers active. But, like so many of us, Twitter's identity and suspension policies hope that there aren't that many sociopaths and nonconsensual sadists in the world. There may not be, but services that aren't oriented the right way, allow people with these personalities or conditions to amplify their efforts and dominate a space.

In its maturity, Twitter must better consider the difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. The former is a measure of how little one party knows of another; the latter, an attempt to wear a different identity. Hidden knowledge, coupled with public pseudonymity, allows commenting untied from one's true identity but not from consequence.

It may be that Twitter's best answer would be tiered users, of which it has but two kinds now: regular and "verified." Through a process that's not publicly defined, Twitter uses real-world identification of members of the press (typically in newsrooms), celebrities, and other accounts typically subject to impersonation. An article by Sarah Jeong at The Verge looks into reports that Twitter may have secret tools and configuration options that it can control behind the scenes.

I, and I'm sure others, would gladly submit to a slightly higher level of scrutiny that would allow me to assert myself as a human who accepts scrutiny on Twitter — and with optional switches that allow filtering or throttling of those who want their speech almost completely detached from identity. I don't want to squelch the voices of people for whom anonymity is important, but I also believe the current system favors an unknown identity over clearly documented paths to abuse.

† I received days of Twitter abuse for the temerity to plan to record a podcast with my friend, Brianna Wu, a frequent target of Gamergate fans.

I'd like to talk very briefly about what it means for scientists. As a science journalist, I'm kind of a middle person, taking information from scientists and presenting it to the public. Increasingly, though, scientists have found ways to take part in that conversation more directly—something that I think is good for scientists, good for the public, and good for science journalists. And blogging, often pseudonymous blogging, is a big part of that.

Why pseudonymous? That's an interesting question, and it's one that the scientist-bloggers themselves have been answering a lot lately, not only because of the G+ Nymwars, but also because of what's happening at Science Blogs. This blogging network, home to quite a few scientist-bloggers, was recently bought by National Geographic, which decided that bloggers could no longer blog under the pseudonyms they'd been using for years.

Personally, I think there are benefits and detriments to anonymity on the Internet, but there's a big difference between being anonymous and having a pseudonym. I may not know who DrugMonkey is in real life, but I know who DrugMonkey is and I know that he has to be as responsible for everything he writes under that name as I am responsible for what I write as Maggie Koerth-Baker. The difference is that writing is my profession. It's not his. Instead, he has to balance the needs of a profession in laboratory science with the needs of a writing hobby. For people who do that, there are a lot of reasons why pseudonyms make sense. For example:

• Blogging gives scientists a higher profile than they might have otherwise had. And that means that there are more people they are likely to offend, which makes them more vulnerable to threats. Simply put: Sometimes scientists get physically threatened when their research doesn't support the "right" pet theory. Pseudonyms make it harder to transfer harassment from the Internet to a scientist's day job.

• Finally, there are a whole bunch of reasons for pseudonymity centered around the fact that scientist-bloggers aren't professional writers. They're professional scientists. Often employed by older people who don't understand why they'd want to blog, or what the value is in doing that, or who'd worry about how a subordinate's blog will reflect on them. I'm a writer. My bosses expect me to write. That's not true for scientists. Janet Stemwedel at the Ethics and Science blog has a great list tied to this, which goes a long way toward explaining why a scientist-blogger might want to be anonymous, while a journalist-blogger would not.

Ultimately, I think this debate has a lot to do with two opposing forces. First, the internet makes it easier to participate in public conversation in a way that only the media was able to do before. Second, just because you want to take part in that conversation doesn't mean you want to be (or are) media. Given that, how do you apply standards of ethics that were designed for a completely different world? I don't really know the answer to this puzzle, but I think it's an increasingly important issue. How do you apply the (often quite reasonable) rules that govern media when the only thing that determines whether or not you are media is if you say so? Until we figure this out, the Nymwars are going to rage on.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2011/08/22/dispatch-from-the-nymwars-pseudonyms-and-science.html/feed47Understanding the Nym Warshttp://boingboing.net/2011/08/20/understanding-the-nym-wars.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/08/20/understanding-the-nym-wars.html#commentsSat, 20 Aug 2011 13:55:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=114521great (JWZ) posts (Kevin Marks) on the Nym Wars, in which Googlers, net users, and sensible people try to convince the G+ team that it's insane to tell people that they must socialize using their "real names," and to then try to adjudicate what a "real name" is.]]>great (JWZ) posts (Kevin Marks) on the Nym Wars, in which Googlers, net users, and sensible people try to convince the G+ team that it's insane to tell people that they must socialize using their "real names," and to then try to adjudicate what a "real name" is. Both link out to the canonical essays produced to date on the subject, such as EFF and boyd, and add a lot of good context.
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